Data processing networks are used in particular in modern medical technology. The (software) applications made available by the data centers are, by way of example, applications for displaying and diagnosing medical image data.
Within the framework of increasing networking and division of tasks in the medical sphere, medical applications are currently conventionally implemented on a multi-level basis and “distributed” (deployed) among a large number of clients on the one hand and one or more servers on the other hand. Here and below the components of such an application which are implemented by the client are called “(application) frontend modules” or “(application) frontends” for short. In a differentiation herefrom the components of the application which are implemented by a server are called “(application) backend modules” or “(application) backends” for short.
Recently there has increasingly been a tendency even in the medical sector to outsource servers and the application backends implemented thereon increasingly from the individual hospitals and other medical organizational structures to comprehensively organized data centers from where server-side hardware and software are made available as an external service within the framework of what is known as a ‘cloud computing’ concept.
The use of a data center allows flexible scalability of the available computing power in particular. Therefore, when deploying a medical application in a data center, a maximum number of virtual servers which can be started and operated simultaneously with each other is conventionally specified. A virtual server includes in this connection one instance of the backend of a deployed medical application respectively. The costs associated with operation of the application at the data center are usually calculated only on the basis of use, however, and are determined in particular by the number of virtual servers that are actually running simultaneously.